As an agenda, wellbeing is meant to open out new ways of
thinking about politics. What I was
struck by, though, was the how the debate was conducted in very much the same
terms as any other. Perhaps inevitably
given the backgrounds of most of the speakers, this ended up being a very
technocratic discussion. The audience
certainly didn’t seem to be at odds with this approach, with one comment from
the floor stressing the need for a wellbeing ‘number’ to rival GDP.

It might seem that such a proposal seeks to fundamentally
change how we approach and judge politics, but in fact it’s merely an echo of a
well-established (and perhaps discredited?) mode of politics. All through O’Donnell’s talk I was thinking
about how much this was the worldview of a New Labour era technocrat. He was talking about the importance of
cost-benefit analysis, and how wellbeing ought to be included in such analyses,
through approaches such as social return on investment tools.

My perspective is slightly different, having seen inside the
sausage machine. All those claims about how
much £1 spent on drug treatment saves the public are reliant on
locally-generated data and cost estimates.
These might be in right ballpark, but they make me question the ability
of them to inform marginal decisions about what to fund or what policy to
implement.

And GOD (as O’Donnell was known) seemed to realise this too,
casting doubt on the figures used to calculate the savings HS2 will generate.

There have been well-documented issues with
government by ‘numbers’, and I would have thought that the real potential
opportunity the concept of ‘wellbeing’ offers is to rethink fundamentally how
we approach political issues. The
problem with GDP as I see it is that it is a single number with little
nuance. To replace it with another
single number would strike me as just as misguided.

Wellbeing in this world isn’t an opportunity to
fundamentally remodel politics; it’s a conceptual device to promote existing
opinions. Nic Marks, for example, at
this event used wellbeing to argue that localism and further devolution of
power was a good idea. Personally, I
can’t see what wellbeing adds to this debate – and I certainly can’t see that
being pro-wellbeing should make you a localist.
I can imagine lots of public health advocates claiming that they believe
in the importance of wellbeing and also noting the
importance of national and international policy decisions on issues like
alcohol. Minimum unit pricing only
really makes sense as a national policy, for example. I’m not sure O’Donnell, with his view of
policymaking and desire for a national wellbeing index, would agree with Marks
either.

The most frustrating element of the event for me, though,
was the lack of discussion around the potential role of a technocratic elite in
making these decisions about what wellbeing might be and how it should be
promoted. David Halpern, the founder of
the Behavioural Insights Team
(better known as the Nudge Unit) originally within the Cabinet Office,
revealingly stated that we’re often not very good at predicting what will make
use happy. He seemed to suggest that
with better analysis and data we could get advice on making all sorts of
decisions. But giving that kind of
advice really does mean having an idea of ‘eudaimonia’ agreed by
society. If analysts are to advise us on
what makes us fulfilled, they’d surely need some kind of assumption about what
fulfilment means for people in Britain.

And here’s the rub, and the key point of why GDP isn’t so
bad after all – or, actually, why thinking in terms of money isn’t so bad. (And I’m in the uncomfortable position of
having to agree with Chris Snowdon on this – see p.92 on the value of economic
growth here.)

The attraction of money – unless you’re modelling yourself
on Silas
Marner prior to the arrival of Eppie – is that you can exchange it for
things you want. You might spend £20,000
on a car. I would think that to be mad,
but it might make you ‘happy’ and ‘fulfilled’, and increase your
‘wellbeing’. Money is a means to the end
of individual fulfilment; wellbeing is that end – but to try to work out what
it is for everyone seems to me to be a little fruitless.

Moreover, one of the dangers of focusing on wellbeing is
that it misses the important point that money is a form of power. The panellists suggested that we needed to
focus on people who didn’t have high wellbeing rather than people who weren’t
well off, but that leads me to worry (and this isn’t a particularly original
thought) that we would be ignoring legitimate questions about the justice of
the distribution of society’s rewards.
Money might not be everything, but it is something worth talking about.

Of course, politics isn’t – and shouldn’t be – simply about
improving people’s financial lot, but the vision proposed at Senate House last
Wednesday didn’t strike me as being any better.
The idea of wellbeing foregrounds issues of values, and we shouldn’t
duck debates about these by thinking we can somehow resolve issues with a new
all-encompassing ‘number’.

About Me

I live and work in Dorchester, a beautiful town in Dorset not far from the south coast.
I’m a Senior Health Programme Advisor within the team that commissions drug and alcohol treatment services through Public Health Dorset, which operates across Bournemouth, Poole and rural Dorset.
I'm also a Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences at Bournemouth University.
How did I get here? Well I did a PhD, also at Bournemouth University, looking at ‘binge’ drinking in Bournemouth and thinking about how class and gender are part of how people understand their own and other people’s drinking. (Search on eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk)
After finishing the PhD I moved to London for a couple of years and worked for the Russell Group of universities, dealing most closely with issues of community engagement, widening participation and, unexpectedly, immigration.
When an opportunity came up to head back down to Dorset and work on drug and alcohol issues, I grabbed it with both hands.
I'm on Twitter: @WilliamHaydock